But if you want to maximize your email marketing campaigns, then you’ll need to start building your list. And the best way to do that in WordPress is by using a mailing list building plugin.

To help you on this step, we’ve compared three of the best list building plugins on the market so that you can build your list in the most efficient way possible.

So, if you’re ready, let’s take a look.

Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is the complete list building plugin for WordPress. It has every type of opt-in form including Sticky Ribbon, Popup Lightbox, Slide-In, Opt-in Widget, and Screen Filler.

What we love about Thrive Leads

Dashboard management

Thrive Leads has a well-organized dashboard area where you can create and monitor all of your opt-in forms:

Lead Groups: Create and edit multiple opt-in forms at once, set them to appear in multiple places at once, and perform A/B testing.

Lead Shortcodes: Create opt-in forms to be manually placed in posts or pages using shortcodes.

ThriveBoxes: Create 2-step lightbox pop-up forms.

Signup Segue – One Click Signup Links: Create one-click signups for existing subscribers; e.g. an email link that registers them directly to a webinar rather than directing them to a landing page to subscribe again.

Each section of the dashboard has a quick tutorial video to get you started:

And once you’ve created and deployed some forms, you’ll start to see how they’re performing:

(Note: This is a high-level view. You can drill down further into performance.)

The Lead Group lets you create the same themed form in different places on your site:

You can read more about these different types of opt-in forms and how to use each one in our Thrive Leads Review here on WP Superstars.

A/B testing

I love the powerful A/B Testing Engine in Thrive Leads. It’s simple to start a test, monitor the results and pick a winner.

You can test:

Different Form Types: A lightbox popup vs. a slide-in form or a widget vs. a ribbon.

Different Triggers: Show a popup after 3 seconds, once the visitor scrolls 50% down the page or when the visitor is about to exit your site.

Different Design & Content: Change the headline, add a new image or switch colors.

Different Offers: An ebook vs. a 4-day video course.

Here’s an example of a test with two different colored opt-in forms and slightly different text:

So far, the Yellow ‘control’ Form has performed better than the Blue ‘test’ form:

You can stop the test when you wish. Or you can set it to automatic and let Thrive Leads pick the winner. Either way, it’s a powerful feature.

Precise targeting

Gone are the days when you only have one generic opt-in form for every type of visitor.

With Thrive Leads Targeting you can display unique opt-in offers that match the content your visitor is reading.

By Post: Be even more precise and target by post. Display an opt-in offer for one or several specific posts. Or choose for the “Show on all Posts” option and exclude certain posts.

By Page: Select any page you want to target, including your homepage, by checking the box.

By Anything: Target by custom post type, custom taxonomy, URL, page type. Or add as many exclusions as you want. The possibilities are endless.

I love how simple this is to configure. As soon as you publish anything on your website, you can target it with a specific opt-in form. No more generic opt-ins.

Advanced trigger options

You can use the Advanced Trigger Options to display your opt-in form at the perfect time.

There are 4 different ways to serve up your opt-in form:

Exit Trigger: Show your opt-in the moment a visitor is thinking about leaving your website.

Time Trigger: Choose between showing your opt-in form instantly or after a certain amount of time (in seconds) has passed.

Scroll Trigger: Choose between showing your opt-in form when a user scrolls to a specific part of the content, after passing a defined percentage of the content, or after reaching the end of your content.

Click Trigger: Show your opt-in when a user clicks an element (like a button or link) in your content.

You can pick one or test different options to find out which works the best for your audience.

Support documentation

Like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads also has an excellent online support section.

The Thrive Leads Knowledge Base includes text articles with screenshots on various help topics, plus video demonstrations. (There are also online help videos in almost every tab in the Thrive dashboard on your site.)

What we don’t love about Thrive Leads

Too granular

Picking fault with Thrive Leads is hard. If I were to get very picky, then I’d say that sometimes it can offer too many customization elements. Until you become familiar with the editor, you may be overwhelmed with the design options.

Pricing

Thrive Leads has three pricing bands based on the number of licenses you require and includes updates and support for one year.

1 Site: $67

5 Sites: $97

15 Sites: $147

Alternatively, try Thrive Membership for access to the complete set of Thrive products available to install and activate on all of your own websites.

Unlike the other two plugins the statistics data includes information pulled from your email provider, like Conversion rate, Subscribers, and Subscriber Growth. It’s useful to have that information inside Bloom rather than checking separately.

Design

Creating your Opt-in follows a natural flow:

Choose your opt-in from

There are six available opt-in types:

Pop-up

Fly-in

Below post

Inline

Locked content

Widget

Configure your email integration

You can connect more than one email service provider to Bloom, so this is just a case of choosing the one you want for this opt-in.

Design your form

Bloom has over 100 layouts to choose from, but they do look rather similar as far as style goes. All have images that can be changed out and animated, and placed in various areas of the opt-in.

Once you’ve chosen a template you can customize it as you wish.

Display settings

Bloom has numerous options so that you can choose when and where to display each opt-in form on your website.

Triggers (when)

First, you decide when your opt-in form will be displayed:

After time delay

After inactivity

At the bottom of post

After scrolling %

After a comment is made

After a purchase (for WooCommerce)

On click (via CSS selector)

The ‘inactivity’ and ‘after purchase’ are different types of triggers to what we’ve seen earlier. But then Bloom doesn’t offer an ‘exit-intent’ trigger like OptinMonster and Thrive Leads.

Targeting (where)

The targeting options in Bloom are excellent. You can choose to display an opt-in on your entire site, or you can decide to display it on individual posts or post types.

For example, you could target specific categories and posts:

And you can refine the targeting further by including or excluding specific pages and posts:

This extra level of refinement gives you complete control over your opt-in’s location.

Support documentation

Bloom, like OptinMonster and Thrive Leads, has excellent online documentation.

The plugin documentation is full of articles on everything from installation and basic settings, to overviews of each type of opt-in form you can create, to tips on creating effective pop-up triggers.

Every article has a video version and includes plenty of helpful screenshots.

What we don’t love about Bloom

Campaigns are driven by opt-in type

Like OptinMonster, Bloom drives its Opt-in campaigns by opt-in type. This seems the wrong way round to me.

No WYSIWYG editor

Bloom does not have a WYSIWYG editor like OptinMonster and Thrive Leads. You make your changes and then press a preview button to see if you have achieved the desired result.

The editing screen:

The preview screen:

It would be better to see your changes as you made them rather than having to visualize what they might look like.

Pricing

Bloom is unavailable as a standalone plugin. Instead, you’ll have to join the Elegant Themes membership scheme and gain full access to all their themes and plugins.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is not just a WordPress plugin. It’s a complete web-based app that’s available for different platforms including WordPress.

You can create and manage most things from your OptinMonster dashboard. But you’ll also need to install a WordPress plugin to connect the two websites via your unique API key.

What we love about OptinMonster

Opt-in design

You can choose from seven types of opt-in form when you create your campaigns:

Lightbox

Sidebar

Floating Bar

After post / In-Line

Slide-in

Mobile

Full Screen

Each type of form has a selection of pre-designed forms which you can edit with drag-and-drop builder.

Several forms have themes that run across each type of opt-in form; e.g. Estate, Firm:

This helps create a consistent look and feel to the opt-in forms across your site.

Display rules

Whichever type of opt-in form you create you have complete control of where and how your campaign appears to visitors.

First, you decide when the campaign should appear:

You can select more than one option from each panel to build your display rules, but all conditions will have to be met for the campaign to trigger.

For example, if you configure your campaign to load after a 5-second delay and set a 40% scroll value, then your visitors will have to be on your site for 5 seconds AND scroll the page 40% or more to trigger the campaign.

Next, you choose who will see the campaign:

Again, you can select more than one option from each panel to build your display rules.

For example: if you configure your campaign to load on pages containing the slug ‘blog’ and only after they’ve viewed 2 or more pages, then your visitors will have to view at least 2 pages on your site that contain the slug ‘blog’ to trigger the campaign.

All-in-all, this is a powerful way of controlling your opt-in campaigns.

MonsterLinks

MonsterLinks is the name of the 2-Step Opt-in technology from OptinMonster.

MonsterLinks can turn any link or image into a 2-step opt-in process. When a user clicks on the link or an image, a popup opens up asking them to subscribe.

If you’ve ever visited Backlinko, then you’ll have seen Brian Dean using MonsterLinks for his Content Upgrades. Here’s a gif from OptinMonster showing you how it looks in practice:

The concept of Content Upgrades is based on a psychology principle known as the Zeigarnik Effect, which states that those who initiate are more likely to finish the process.

When Syed Balkhi (Co-Founder of OptinMonster) used a combination of Content Upgrade + MonsterLinks he increased his conversions by 845% compared to a Generic Exit-Intent Popup:

Success themes

The perfect time to catch your user’s attention is the moment right after they subscribe.

OptinMonster have created various action-specific success themes that encourage subscribers to take the next step in your funnel, such as:

Download your lead magnet

Watch a Video

Like your Facebook Page

Purchase your product

Here is an example of the Liked success theme encouraging new subscribers to Like the WP Superstars Facebook Page:

Support documentation

The OptinMonster support documentation is excellent. It covers every topic in detail so that you can create, install, and optimize your opt-in forms.

If you should come across a problem that you can’t find explained in the online documentation, then you can submit a support request to the team.

What we don’t love about OptinMonster

Each campaign is dictated by opt-in type

Each campaign you create is determined by your opt-in type. For example, Campaign 1 uses a Lightbox, Campaign 2 uses a Slide In.

I prefer to have a campaign that is determined by your lead magnet with multiple types of form. For example, Campaign 1 is “7 WordPress Hacks” and is created as a Lightbox, Sidebar, and Slide In. (Note: You wouldn’t want to use each opt-in form on every page. But page targeting controls that.)

With this method, when you track your campaign results you can see how well your lead magnet performed in each category.

Pricing

OptinMonster has three pricing bands that vary the number of features and site licenses.

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Posted by David Hartshorne

David Hartshorne is a freelance writer helping solopreneurs and small business owners build their online presence through friendly, engaging and shareable web content. When he’s not writing about WordPress and the latest digital marketing tools, you’ll find him chilling with a thriller in Spain.